Cannabis and Culture (1975)

Front cover of the 1975 Mouton edition

Front cover of the 1975 Mouton edition

Cannabis and Culture

Publication

Editor	Vera Rubin
Publisher	Mouton
Place	The Hague
Published	1975
Pages	xiv + 598
Language	English

Coverage

Subjects	Cannabis history, Ethnobotany, Cultural anthropology, Psychoactive plants
Relevance	An early cross-cultural survey of traditional cannabis cultures, with regional chapters on southern Africa, the Moroccan Rif, India, Nepal and Jamaica that are among the earliest academic records of the folk cultivation traditions behind today's threatened landraces.

Access

ISBN	90-279-7669-4
DOI	10.1515/9783110812060

Cannabis and Culture is a 1975 edited volume on the cross-cultural study of cannabis, edited by the American anthropologist Vera Rubin and published by Mouton in its World Anthropology series. It collects an editor's introduction and 35 papers first presented at a conference on Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Cannabis convened in Chicago in August 1973 during the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, with case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and North America.

In her introduction Rubin distinguishes two broad configurations of cannabis use: a traditional "ganja complex", a multipurpose folk stream involving fibre, food, folk medicine, work and ritual and generally confined to peasant and labouring classes, and a modern "marihuana complex" centred on the mood-altering use of the plant and associated with middle-class and youth cultures from the later nineteenth century onward. The volume also carries a taxonomic reconsideration of the plant, including a proposal by Richard Evans Schultes and co-authors for a polytypic classification of Cannabis.

Editor

Vera Rubin (1911–1985) was an American anthropologist whose work centred on the Caribbean. In 1955 she founded the Research Institute for the Study of Man in New York and directed it until her death. For the National Institute of Mental Health she and Lambros Comitas directed a study of long-term cannabis use in Jamaica, published in the same year as Cannabis and Culture under the title Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. Four of the volume's chapters draw on that project.

Background

The volume originated in a conference on Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Cannabis, held in Chicago in August 1973 as part of the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The conference was attended by around sixty scientists working in anthropology, botany, genetics, pharmacology, psychiatry and sociology, and was supported by a grant to the Smithsonian Institution from the Center for Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Cannabis and Culture appeared in the World Anthropology series, a set of some two thousand papers from the 1973 Congress issued under the general editorship of Sol Tax. Tax described the series as an attempt to draw contributors from many parts of the world rather than only the industrialised nations that had founded the discipline, and each volume was designed to be self-contained. A companion volume from the same Congress addressed the cross-cultural study of alcohol. The volume was later reissued as a digital edition by De Gruyter Mouton.

The collection's geographic range is wide. Its regional chapters include Brian du Toit on the history and ethnographic setting of Cannabis sativa in southern Africa, Roger Joseph on the economic significance of cannabis in the Moroccan Rif, Marie Alexandrine Martin on Southeast Asia, Khwaja A. Hasan on India, James Fisher on Nepal and four chapters on Jamaica drawn from a field project directed by Rubin. Du Toit's chapter is among the sources underpinning Cannabis in South Africa and Joseph's among those for Cannabis in Morocco. Martin's chapter, on Cambodia and its neighbours, is catalogued separately as Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia (1975).

Argument

Rubin's introduction frames cannabis as one of the most widely used psychoactive plants after tobacco and alcohol, and one of the oldest cultivated plants, grown for fibre, food and medicine long before its modern reputation as an intoxicant.

Her central organising claim is that cannabis has moved through two distinct cultural streams. The first, which she terms the "ganja complex" after the Hindi word and the ethnographic record of the 1893 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, is a traditional folk configuration based on small-scale cultivation. In it cannabis served as a source of fibre, food and folk medicine for people and animals, and as an aid to work, ritual and sociability, its use largely confined to peasants, fishermen, artisans and labourers and, among elites, to priestly classes. The second, the "marihuana complex", is more recent and more narrowly psychoactive, traced from the formation of the Club des Hachichins in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of recreational use to North America and to Western-oriented youth elsewhere, and associated chiefly with middle-class and upper-class users. Rubin argues that the two complexes differ in form, function and social class composition.

The volume also advances a botanical argument. William T. Stearn re-examines the Linnaean typification of Cannabis sativa, and Richard Evans Schultes with William M. Klein, Timothy Plowman and Tom E. Lockwood argue for a polytypic classification of the genus, which Rubin describes as the first major reconsideration of cannabis taxonomy since Linnaeus and Lamarck.

Contents

The volume opens with an introduction by Vera Rubin and is then divided into five parts.

Part One: Ethnobotany and diffusion

1. "Typification of Cannabis sativa L." (William T. Stearn)
2. "Cannabis: An Example of Taxonomic Neglect" (Richard Evans Schultes, William M. Klein, Timothy Plowman and Tom E. Lockwood)
3. "Early Diffusion and Folk Uses of Hemp" (Sula Benet)
4. "The Origin and Use of Cannabis in Eastern Asia: Their Linguistic-Cultural Implications" (Hui-Lin Li)
5. "Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia" (Marie Alexandrine Martin)
6. "Cannabis Smoking in 13th–14th Century Ethiopia: Chemical Evidence" (Nikolaas J. van der Merwe)
7. "Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis sativa in Southern Africa" (Brian M. du Toit)

Part Two: Sociocultural aspects of the traditional complex

8. "The Social Nexus of Ganja in Jamaica" (Lambros Comitas)
9. "The Ritual Use of Cannabis in Mexico" (Roberto Williams-Garcia)
10. "Cannabis and Cultural Groups in a Colombian Municipio" (William L. Partridge)
11. "Patterns of Marihuana Use in Brazil" (Harry William Hutchinson)
12. "Economic Significance of Cannabis sativa in the Moroccan Rif" (Roger Joseph)
13. "Traditional Patterns of Hashish Use in Egypt" (Ahmad M. Khalifa)
14. "The Traditional Role and Symbolism of Hashish among Moroccan Jews in Israel and the Effect of Acculturation" (Phyllis Palgi)
15. "The Social and Cultural Context of Cannabis Use in Rwanda" (Helen Codere)
16. "Réunion: Cannabis in a Pluricultural and Polyethnic Society" (Jean Benoist)
17. "Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India" (Khwaja A. Hasan)
18. "Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview" (James Fisher)
19. "The 'Ganja Vision' in Jamaica" (Vera Rubin)

Part Three: Medical, pharmacological and ethnometabolic studies

20. "Cannabis sativa L. (Marihuana): VI Variations in Marihuana Preparations and Usage – Chemical and Pharmacological Consequences" (Alvin B. Segelman, R. Duane Sofia and Florence H. Segelman)
21. "Social and Medical Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in Brazil" (Alvaro Rubim de Pinho)
22. "Sociocultural and Epidemiological Aspects of Hashish Use in Greece" (C. Stefanis, C. Ballas and D. Madianou)
23. "Marihuana and Genetic Studies in Colombia: The Problem in the City and in the Country" (B. R. Elejalde)
24. "Cannabis Usage in Pakistan: A Pilot Study of Long Term Effects on Social Status and Physical Health" (Munir A. Khan, Assad Abbas and Knud Jensen)
25. "The Significance of Marihuana in a Small Agricultural Community in Jamaica" (Joseph Schaeffer)
26. "Chronic Cannabis Use in Costa Rica: A Description of Research Objectives" (W. E. Carter and W. J. Coggins)

Part Four: Traditional usage of other psychoactive plants

27. "Man, Culture and Hallucinogens: An Overview" (Marlene Dobkin de Rios)
28. "Peyote and Huichol Worldview: The Structure of a Mystic Vision" (Barbara G. Myerhoff)
29. "Magico-Religious Use of Tobacco among South American Indians" (Johannes Wilbert)
30. "Coca Chewing: A New Perspective" (Roderick E. Burchard)
31. "Cannabis or Alcohol: The Jamaican Experience" (Michael H. Beaubrun)

Part Five: The modern complex in North America

32. "Cannabis Use in Canada" (Melvyn Green and Ralph D. Miller)
33. "Memories, Reflections and Myths: The American Marihuana Commission" (Louis Bozzetti and Jack Blaine)
34. "Sociocultural Factors in Marihuana Use in the United States" (William H. McGlothlin)
35. "Intersections of Anthropology and Law in the Cannabis Area" (John Kaplan)

Reception

The volume was reviewed in Medical History in 1977.

Writing in 2021, the historians James H. Mills and Lucas Richert placed Cannabis and Culture among the academic studies of cannabis that followed the drug concerns of the 1960s, and noted that Rubin's introduction took what would now be read as a global perspective in describing the "ethnobotanic diffusion" of the plant. They also questioned her "ganja complex" model, which treated the South Asian appetite for cannabis as long-standing and unchanging.

See also

• Cannabis: Global Histories (2021)
• The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)
• Ganja matters (2026)
• Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia (1975)
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission